Terrorism is a symptom of what’s wrong with our culture(s), as are: racism, sexism, trolls on the internet, unemployment, mass migration, hospital-acquired infections, the “obesity epidemic”, poverty, global warming, a lot of advertising, most of modern politics, and a lot else besides.
     There would be no terrorism if the promises of western civilisation were met. If (for example) a young Muslim boy could grow up in an outer suburb of Paris or Brussels, pass through an effective education system that enabled him to find and hold down a job – and feel good about himself while doing so – and then find a life partner, raise a family, grow old in security, die in peace – there would be no terrorism.
     People choose to become terrorists. They don’t choose terrorism from a list of good alternatives; they choose it over despair, futility, poverty, hunger. I believe terrorism, like juvenile crime, is now entrenched in our culture. To defeat – or minimise – terrorism means giving young people a meaningful life.
     To think of terrorism as an external threat emanating from the Middle East is to think in the terms of past wars. Terrorism is what happens when people lose hope. Yes, there are wars in the Middle East, and we started them, but if the promises were met, those wars would stay in the Middle East. A distant war doesn’t necessarily breed domestic terrorism.
     I’ve left out anger – anger that the state is wrong, and/or anger that the state is betraying its promise. “The West” holds out a promise that is barely met at any level – the loudest promises of the food industry – the food industry! – emanate from the makers of the fastest, least healthy food. We don’t ban cigarettes; we tax them to fund healthcare. Paper currency – backed by gold, ha ha?
     It’s tempting to quote Yeats – the centre cannot hold – except that the rough beast is already among us and might trigger a necessary catharsis. The centre is structurally unsound, at state as well as regional level.
     I take a “physician, heal thyself” (as in: western civilisation, heal thyself) attitude to today’s terrorism. Yes, it’s difficult. Yes, a perfectly healed society is unattainable, but the more effective direction of travel would be towards social care and attention, healing, education, positive change – rather than yet another “war on terror”.
     That’s why I find it so awful that their religious leaders are only ever countered by our secular leaders.

We all make mistakes in our relationships with other people. Sometimes, they're mistakes that can be corrected with an apology. Sometimes - "if only I'd said that, and not that." Sometimes, they're mistakes that are incomprehensible even to ourselves, and sometimes, we do things that show us up as not quite the likeable hero of our own story that we want to think we are.
     I've done a few things. Some of them couldn't have been done by somebody as all-round friendly and nice as the person that I know myself to be. Did I really do that? Oh. I did. One get-out is denial; clearly I wasn't thinking straight that day. Another is a weak, perverse, cover-up form of self-affirmation: hey, I'm tougher and more bad-ass than I look (it wears off quickly). And a third is spiritual growth - take it into the complex mix of good and bad, heroic and too shameful to admit, that makes up every human personality - and move a tiny bit closer to an understanding of who I really am.
     But this is not about me. I'm following an exchange on Facebook. A young journalist has done some work for a PR agency that was first accepted and then rejected, and has asked for advice on how to get her invoice paid. My reading of it is: the PR agency is a recent start-up; the young guy behind it was unprofessional (and perhaps good-natured) enough to accept the work before he even looked at it. Then he ran into a cash-flow problem, or changed his mind about what he wanted, or read the work and it wasn't what he'd expected - or whatever; and his solution was to reject the work, go back on his explicit commitment to pay for it, and reply to the journalist's request for payment - well, not in a friendly way.
     In an intimidating way, actually. The manner of the rejection puts me on the journalist's side. I feel quite cross. The closed group of journalists - thousands of them - where the journalist has gone for advice seems quite cross too. The young PR guy has shown himself to be something of a bully, in my estimation. There's a storm blowing up around him, and up to a point, he deserves it.
     But I'd say one thing. We've all done things that we regret. There's a group on Facebook that doesn't like this guy right now, but I hope they give him a chance to atone - and maybe to learn something about himself, and put it right.

Immediately after his election as leader of the Labour Party, the comment was made about Jeremy Corbyn that he had spent his entire political career rebelling against his own party. Having opposed it for so long, how could he lead it?
     By opposing it?

There's a report by the Samaritans about men and suicide. It's titled Men, Suicide and Society, and it finds that men are more likely to take their own lives than women (in the UK and ROI). The report looks at 'Why disadvantaged men in mid-life die by suicide', and that subtitle pretty much gives you the conclusion: they do it because they're disadvantaged. As the foreword puts it, "men are three times more likely than women to die by suicide. Even more glaring is the socio-economic inequality in suicide risk - with those in the poorest socio-economic circumstances approximately ten times more at risk than those in the most affluent conditions."
     If you're a poor man, your options for a mid-life crisis include taking your own life. This is a "male suicide emergency", says one newspaper headline, in that "the male suicide rate is at a 14-year high" (same convenient source). Men, Suicide and Society focuses on gender, obviously, and on socio-economics, also obviously. It reviews "evidence and theory in psychology, sociology, economics and gender studies", and is convincing - I think - in what it says about the personality traits intrinsic to the condition of masculinity (some of them taught, learned, inferred; some not). Where it goes into talking about feelings, I was reminded of books by Deborah Tannen that I read years ago.
     Men, Suicide and Society doesn't cover everything. There's talk about the "feminisation" of employment (defined as the shift towards a service economy and away from heavy manual labour), and of a range of other issues, but no mention of another much-discussed socio-economic (?) factor that might be significant here. "This report has chosen not to focus on the role of ethnicity," it tells us, and then we jump a bit about sexuality, which is also omitted, to find the explanation that "examining the experiences and identities of British and Irish middle-aged working-class men, the majority of whom are white and heterosexual, is core to reducing death by suicide".
     Gender yes, but ethnicity no? I found this surprising, Most of them are white. Are we not saying, then, that white disadvantaged men in mid-life are more likely to die by suicide? Mostly white, anyway? I went online and found the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP). Never heard of it, and only know about it what I've read online. But the AFSP also publishes studies on suicide. The latest, which draws on statistics of the same vintage as those in Men, Suicide and Society (2013, although the AFSP's population is obviously bigger) draws this conclusion: "White males accounted for 70% of all suicides in 2013." I wasn't surprised. [There's a lot more detail than that.]
     Gender and ethnicity get a lot of coverage and it's impossible to be objective about them. I don't want to talk about age or sexuality, for the same reason. Nor do I want to defend men. History is full of white male oppressors, exploiters, discriminators, deniers of the rights of just about everybody else. Today, men are more dangerous to women than women are to men. In short, it's much easier to depict men - white men in particular - as aggressors needing to be controlled, than as victims in need of support.
     And yet they're killing themselves.
     It's also easy enough to poke fun at men: today's 'patriarch' is more likely to be depicted as a middle-aged domestic blunderer than as any kind of authority figure. So much for the passing on of a role model. From Men, Suicide and Society: "Men in mid-life are now part of the ‘buffer’ generation, not sure whether to be like their older, more traditional, strong, silent, austere fathers or like their younger, more progressive, individualistic sons." They're also somewhere between invisible and valueless: a recent news report told us that a group of eight migrants saved from a sinking small boat "included one woman"; any report on a disaster will routinely make clear that the casualties "included women and children". What's the value of a disadvantaged white man in a news report?
     None of this adds up to an argument that we should suddenly turn our attention to mens' rights. Because men are still - for want of a better expression - the bad guys. The 2016 Glastonbury Festival included a venue called The Sisterhood, which was "an intersectional, queer, trans and disability-inclusive space open to all people who identify as women". People who identified as men were excluded. Why? "Women-only spaces are necessary in a world that is still run by and designed to benefit mainly men. Oppression against women continues in various manifestations around the world today, in different cultural contexts." Fair enough. But my question would be: who's running and designing the world to benefit mainly men? Because the world is not being designed and run by disadvantaged white men, and they're certainly not the beneficiaries.
     Mostly, the world is being run by advantaged white men, with some parts of it run by advantaged non-white men, and in some places, advantaged women. Mostly, it's men. Mostly, they're white. All of them are by definition advantaged, whether or not they realise, acknowledge and/or accept that. If The Sisterhood has a purpose, it is to give the disadvantaged a space. It would be ridiculous to compare The Sisterhood's exclusion of men with the way the old-time London clubs used to exclude women (some still do, I think) - except to make the point that disadvantaged white men would be excluded from both. Advantaged white men design and run the world to benefit their own kind - which is not the same as saying that men run the world for men. There's a small, self-perpetuating group of white men that sets itself apart from other white men, as well as from everybody else.
     Generally speaking, we don't have to declare our support for the disadvantaged, because it's assumed. We could all complete the sentences "I am a..." and "I am not a..." with a word that ends in "-ist". But we don't have to, because being a feminist and not being a racist (for example) are taken for granted as the default position for any right-thinking person. We don't discriminate.
     And yet we do. There's no similarly taken-for-granted "-ism" for disadvantaged white men in mid-life, although the suicide statistics suggest that they need one. We may have learned (from history, from the way men behave) a collection of negative associations to go with the qualities "white" and "male", but today's disadvantaged white men are as disadvantaged as the rest of us.
     And they're killing themselves.
     Excluding men from a women-only space makes as much sense as excluding women from a men-only space, but it's not the same as excluding oppressors from an oppressed-only space.
     Except ... all men are potentially dangerous. More so than women, say the statistics.
     There is no easy answer to this.
     One answer to the "male suicide emergency" would be to adjust government policy so that it helps out middle-aged white blokes. But wouldn’t that mean at least some redistribution of advantage away from people who are not middle-aged, nor white, nor blokes? Imagine the political fall-out, and the unintended consequences.
     Sometimes, I just want to argue against the classification of people into easily labelled groups – although I suppose our least-worst approach to government requires it. But it’s difficult sometimes to keep in mind that every hard-working family that is just about managing, or disadvantaged white man, or whatever other shorthand classification we’re using today, is in truth a collection of distinct individuals. I want to argue for empathy.
     Maybe trying to fix things is the wrong approach. Maybe identifying a problem and then looking for a solution – even making the assumption that there will be a solution – is to mistake the nature of the world. It’s imperfect. Trying to fix it won’t change that. Forget about hard-working families and go make friends with the people next door.
     And be careful.